Unless you are completely new to Nordic Folk, you will know that the genre’s best times are behind it. It reached its climax a few years ago and it stopped being nouvelle and wondrous before that. Today, even its best-known actors are stuck in the ruts they have created, replicating themselves and recycling previous efforts. Bands like Wardruna and Heilung seem to have created a template, a recipe, a how to, and the projects that came after them have been copying their approaches, their instrumentation, their song structures, even their attire. Authenticity is hard to find. The genre is in desperate need of fresh air, of innovation, of change. Only, change is nowhere in sight. It looks like this cow is going to be milked for years to come.
Unfortunately, the album at hand and the band that produced it, are no exception to the situation sketched above. On the contrary, you could even say they are a prime example of it. SKÁLD are a French Nordic Folk band (read that again, but slowly) formed in 2018 and grouped around producer/composer Christophe Voisin-Boisvinet. The band is aptly named after the Old Norse word for composer or reciter of poems and has amassed an astonishing following since jumping on the Nordic folk wagon. Their success may primarily be attributed to luck, a case of being in the right place at the right time. So far, their music has shown little character that would lift them above well-known genre norms. Like other Nordic folk and Neofolk bands, they rely heavily on the effect of pounding percussion, multi-vocal chanting and the sound of various harps, pipes and other ancient instruments, like the lyre or the hurdy-gurdy. If anything, their output seemed to be watered-down in order to be more palatable and easier digestible for the wider public, in order to sound nice. The darker aspects of the source material they claim to be building their music on are safely left untouched.
While the band’s previous two albums were titled Vikings Chant and Vikings Memories, and while their band site is to be found under skaldvikings.com – in case anyone wasn’t sure about the project’s connection to the Vikings – their new LP is named Huldufólk. The “huldufólk” are the hidden people, the elves and trolls populating Scandinavian folk tales. And thus, SKÁLD, with their new album, are “plunging listeners into the myths and legends of Scandinavia” and leading “modern men and women to flee, far from the harsh realities of everyday life, like the first colonies of settlers in Iceland” did, says the press material. It then specifies further that the album is meant as “an adventure that makes us dream of Nature, the forests, rivers and mysteries found in the folklore of the Far North”. I reckon that modern men and women would be quite surprised about the realities of life in the medieval Far North and the differences to this romanticised version.
The majority the album’s twelve compositions stay unsurprisingly in well-known Nordic folk and Neofolk waters. Three tracks stand out. Two of them, because they have a more exciting, more rousing character than the rest of the material. Those tracks are Ljósálfur and Elverhøy, and I wouldn’t mind listening to them again, let’s say on a Nordic folk/Neofolk compilation, although the guttural male vocals at the end of Ljósálfur sound like they were sampled from a Heilung album, and although Elverhøy, judging from its rhythm, could also be a more modern marching song. The song that I can’t get my head around, however, is track number eleven, a cover song.
On an album about elves, trolls and the landscapes they inhabit, SKÁLD have included a cover of Rammstein’s Du hast. No explanation is given as to the why. A teaser on the band’s social media announces the piece as something “out of the box” they have done. Well. This is so out of the box that anybody who hasn’t lost their sight can see that it shouldn’t be here. Du hast is a song about a marriage proposal gone wrong, a song about love hate relationships. Its cold industrial atmosphere reeks of toxic masculinity, even more so with the decades that have gone by since its release. Where is the connection to Nordic folk and mystical creatures? If you manage to construe a connection, make sure you tell me. Du hast in SKÁLD’s Neofolk version has lost its character and its meaning. Without the square, rigid riffs and the stench of testosterone the lyrics make absolutely no sense and I’m afraid it buried the album for me. Now the whole endeavour has got a bit of ridiculousness about it, and I can’t take this serious anymore.
If you want to listen to a more authentic take on Nordic Folk, check out Dane Nanna Barslev and her latest album Lysbaerer. The album at hand you can skip. And you won’t have to feel bad about it at all.
(4/10 Slavica)
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